Submissions

We are currently CLOSED for submissions.

The short version

1

Submissions must be in response to one of our spurs

2

We want work that doesn’t fit easily into boxes

These are our only hard-and-fast rules. The whole point of this endeavour is to make space for the unexpected, so we don’t want to burden you with too many parameters. But for a more detailed idea of what will appeal to us, read on!

The long version

Verse Kraken is looking for weird, experimental and surprising unpublished work in any medium. We believe that wonderful art springs up in the gaps and intersections between forms and genres, and we want to provide a home for the results.

A non-exhaustive list of things we would love to publish includes: prose poetry, concrete poetry, performance poetry, multilingual texts, hypertext fiction, graphic fiction, remixes, collaborative work, and work that mixes visuals/text/audio/video. If you’ve got something that isn’t on that list, because it hasn’t even occurred to us, we’ll probably be even more excited. Try us!

We are also interested in work that appears more traditional in form but crosses boundaries of genre, plays with style, or engages with boundaries and in-betweens in a thematic way.

We value work from under-represented perspectives, including feminist, queer, and multicultural voices.

The spurs

Each call for submissions will be accompanied by three ‘spurs’ – pieces of art/writing/photography/film/music/whatever, taken from the public domain. Submissions must be in response to one of these.

Why? Partly to give you something to get the imagination fired up, and partly because cross-pollination is awesome. Plenty of publications ask for submissions based on a particular theme or prompt, so think of this as a more multi-media version of that. We will always choose spurs that we feel have enough different layers that people can interpret them in many different ways.

We don’t want to dictate how you respond to a spur, but some approaches could include: taking one theme or image from the spur as the starting point for your own piece, ‘translating’ the spur into a different medium, arguing with the spur, looking into the origins of the spur. We don’t mind how you interpret this brief so long as there is a clear link back to the original spur (i.e please don’t just give one of your old poems a new title and send that to us, we want work specifically created for us). Keep an eye on the ‘tips‘ section of our blog for more ideas and suggestions!

practicalities

We don’t want to limit you by putting strict limits on the size or length of works. However, we’d like our issues to be things that readers can enjoy over a coffee or lunch break, so shorter works are more likely to find a home here.